Chapter 1: Blood in the Moonlight
My lungs are on fire. Each gasp feels like I’m swallowing shattered glass. The air here doesn’t help—it’s thick, electric, and tastes like a storm that’s about to break. The trees are all wrong, gnarled and black, bleeding silver sap that catches the weird twilight in slow, glowing drips. Every leaf looks like it could cut me.
They’ll kill you if you don’t improve soon.
Aria’s voice, usually so calm, loops in my head. It’s not a threat from her. It’s a warning. A translation of the looks I get from the instructors, the other trainees. The silent verdict in their eyes.
My boot catches on a root that twists like a broken spine. I stumble forward, hands slapping against rough, weeping bark to stop my face from meeting the ground. I stay there for a second, forehead against the tree, panting. Sweat stings my eyes. I can feel the extra weight I carry, the softness that marks me as utterly human in a place built for demons and warriors. But I can also feel the new hardness in my legs after a week of this self-imposed hell. The slight, defiant shift of my body.
I push off and keep running. The path is a vague suggestion through the clutching undergrowth. I’m not supposed to be this deep in the Whispering Woods. Too easy to get lost, to attract things. But the academy track was too exposed. I couldn’t stand the eyes.
I need the roof. I need the food. The alternative is a sidewalk and hunger so deep it makes your bones ache. I know that ache.
It’s why I run.
The memory hits me in time with my footfalls. Three months ago. Tsubaki and me, standing outside the closed doors of the group home for the last time, our trash bags of belongings at our feet. Eighteen. Aged out. The great, yawning freedom of nowhere to go.
We walked for hours. Then we saw her. A woman, leaning against a lamp-post in an alley that seemed to pulse with a wrong kind of dark. Light brown hair, almost blonde, down to her waist. Kind face. But the air around her shimmered, like a heat haze on asphalt. Everyone else just walked past, blind.
Tsubaki froze. “Do you see that?”
“Yeah,” I’d whispered.
The woman’s head snapped toward us. Her eyes, a startling violet, widened in pure shock. She was shocked we could see her. That was the first clue that our lives had permanently derailed.
Her name was Aria. She bought us burgers, her gaze never leaving us, a mix of wonder and deep, deep worry. “You shouldn’t be able to see me,” she’d said, french fry paused mid-air. “It means you’re waking up.”
A week later, she swept us here. The Shadow Domain. A whole other world layered on top of ours, fighting a secret war. Turns out, late-blooming angelic blood is a thing. A rare, flagged-for-harvest thing. We were the harvest. Aria’s job is to find people like us before the demons do, or before we accidentally set something on fire with powers we don’t understand.
We were enrolled in the Shadow Academy. Against our will. But, as Aria said with a sad smile, it’s not like we had wills that led anywhere good. Here, we have bunks. We have a mess hall. We have a purpose, however terrifying: learn to fight, or die.
The hierarchy here is a pyramid shoved down your throat on day one. At the top, the Guardians. Mythic. Divine. They’re like nuclear weapons with a conscience, supposedly. They can mess with time, fate, minds. They have this thing called Heavenly Fire. No one ever sees them.
Below them, the Wardens. They run the four territories, politicians with armies.
Then, the Protectors. That’s what they’re trying to turn us into. Soldiers. Enhanced strength, speed, healing. They work in squads, hunting demons, keeping the walls of this crazy world standing. It’s a six-year program. The last two, you get shoved into a real squad. Trial by literal fire.
At the bottom: raw recruits like me and Tsubaki. Cannon fodder in training.
Tsubaki is managing. She played varsity soccer. She knows how to push her body, how to breathe. She’s already moved ahead in tactical drills. I’m lagging. Always lagging. In foster care, you keep your head down. You don’t stand out. You sure as hell don’t run unless someone’s chasing you. My body learned to be still, to be small. Now I have to unlearn it, or I get cut.
And getting cut doesn’t mean going back to Seattle. It means being cut loose here, in a world that eats the helpless. Or worse, being handed to the ‘civilian authority’ Aria mutters about, which sounds like a prison with lab coats.
Alone. I’d be all alone. Tsubaki would stay. The thought is a sharper pain than the stitch in my side.
A branch whips past my face. I flinch. That’s when I feel it—the prickling on the back of my neck. The weight of a gaze.
I don’t look up. Not directly.
I know he’s there. In the high, twisted branches of a sap-weeping tree to my left. He’s been there every morning for the past week. Watching. A silent, smug shadow.
My blood heats, pushing back some of the exhaustion. Piss off, I think, pouring the anger into my legs. My pace picks up. His stupid surveillance is the best motivation I have. I imagine his surprised face if I actually got good. If I wasn’t just the out-of-shape charity case from the human world.
Aria warned me about him. “That’s Ren. Squad Leader for the perimeter defense detail. He’s… intense. His job is to assess threats. Just keep your head down, do your work, and stay out of his way.”
So I run. I push until black spots dance at the edges of my vision, until Aria’s warning and Ren’s watching eyes and the fear of being alone all blur into one single, driving need: move.
A final, desperate sprint brings me to the tree line. The academy walls loom ahead, slick black stone humming with embedded energy. The main gate is still a quarter-mile off. I stagger to a halt, doubling over, hands on my knees. I suck in huge, ragged breaths. The air here is cleaner, sterile.
When I finally straighten up, wiping my mouth, I glance back.
For a fraction of a second, I see him. A silhouette, lean and poised, perched like a dark bird against the bruise-colored sky. He’s not even pretending to hide. He just watches.
Then he’s gone. Melting back into the shadows as if he was never there.
I turn toward the gate, my heart still hammering, but not just from the run. A different kind of energy buzzes under my skin. Fury. Defiance. A terrifying spark I don’t recognize.
I’m not significant. I never have been. A foster kid. A number. A liability.
But he’s watching. They’re all watching.
Maybe I can use that.
A shrill whistle cuts the air from the academy grounds. Drill Instructor Boros. Morning drills start in five. Tsubaki will be waiting, her face tight with worry for me.
I start walking, then jogging, toward the sound. My body protests, but the ember in my chest burns a little brighter. I just have to last one more day. Then another. Then another.
The shadow in the tree is gone, but the feeling remains. The game has already begun. I just have to learn how to play before I’m removed from the board.
I just have to learn how to play before I’m removed from the board.
The whistle was still echoing in my skull the next morning, a piercing screech that meant pain. We stood in a ragged line on the wet grass of the training field, dawn light painting everything a sickly grey. My body ached from yesterday’s run, a deep, cellular complaint.
I never realized how loud the world was before. The constant screen time, everyone with a smart phone. Even Tsubaki and I had cheap smartphones gifted from donations in foster care, our eyes constantly glued to screens for escape. I didn’t know until I came to this place. The constant hum of technology was absent here, replaced by a deeper, more threatening quiet—the silence of watching eyes and whispered judgment. We were issued phones, sleek black slabs, but they were for official communications only, monitored. No games. No social media. Just another chain.
“Pick up your partner and run!” Borros’s voice tore through the quiet, a bark that didn’t wait for an echo. He stood off to the side, arms crossed over a barrel chest, his head shaved to grey bristle. His eyes, like chips of flint, found me immediately.
My partner was Liam, a wiry guy from the Northern Territory who smelled like pine and resentment. He was light, but not light enough. I hoisted him into a fireman’s carry, my spine screaming in protest. Then we were running.
My muscles ignited. A pure, white-hot burn that started in my thighs and erupted through my whole body. The weight compressed my lungs. Each stride was a negotiation with gravity, and gravity was winning. Borros paced the field, his critique a low, relentless growl.
“You’re dragging, Kashikoi! Your feet are concrete! Is that all the human world has to offer? Soft and weak!”
Sweat blurred my vision. Spit gathered in my mouth. I focused on the back of Tsubaki’s head twenty yards ahead, her own partner bouncing as she ran with a grim, focused efficiency I couldn’t match.
“Too much fat, not enough muscle! You’re a liability! A burden on your squad!”
His words were needles, pricking the balloon of my focus. My legs began to go numb, a terrifying detachment, as if they were someone else’s limbs stubbornly refusing my brain’s commands. The world narrowed to the jarring impact of my boots on the dirt, Liam’s uncomfortable grunt, and the searing pain.
Then my knee buckled.
I went down hard, one side collapsing. Liam tumbled from my shoulders with a yelp. The cool, damp grass pressed against my cheek. I couldn’t breathe. I just lay there, spasming, the world a dizzy, roaring mess of grey sky.
“Arisa!” Tsubaki’s voice, strained and distant. Her shadow fell over me. She was drenched, her dark skin sheened with sweat, her chest heaving. She looked wrecked, but she was upright. She knelt, a hand on my shoulder. “Breathe. Just breathe.”
Borros loomed over us, a monolith of disgust. “Get up.”
I couldn’t. My body was a spent, broken thing.
But then I heard it. Not Borros. Aria’s voice, calm and certain, a memory surfacing through the pain. They’ll kill you if you don’t improve soon.
It wasn’t a threat from her. It was a fact. A law of this place.
With a sound that was half-groan, half-snarl, I rolled. I pushed my hands against the earth, slick with dew and my own sweat. I forced one knee under me, then the other. I stood, swaying, the field tilting.
Liam stared, wide-eyed.
“Pick him up,” Borros said, no praise in his tone, just a clinical note of observation. “Finish the drill.”
Somehow, I did. The last hundred yards were a blackout. I don’t remember my legs moving. I just remember collapsing again at the finish line, the weight gone, my head pounding like a war drum in my skull. I crawled to the water station and gulped from a hose, the lukewarm liquid the best thing I’d ever tasted.
Borros dismissed us with a grunt. “Showers. Class. Move.”
The walk to the locker room was a death march. The other students flowed around us, a stream of efficient, conditioned bodies. Their eyes slid over me, over Tsubaki. Weary glances, sidelong and dismissive. They’d grown up here, knowing this life. We were interlopers, anomalies grafted onto their world. They never seemed to get used to us.
The showers were communal, tiled and echoing. The water was brutally hot, sluicing dirt and shame down the drain. I dressed in the stiff academy uniform—black trousers, a grey tunic with a subtle territorial stripe at the shoulder. My hands trembled buttoning it.
Tsubaki was quiet beside me, pulling on her cropped green jacket over her grey shirt. “He’s trying to break you,” she said, her voice low.
“He’s succeeding,” I muttered, pulling on my boots.
“No, he’s not. You got back up.”
That was the bare minimum. Getting back up just meant you were still in the fight. It didn’t mean you were winning.
We headed to the History wing, our footsteps echoing in the vast, stone corridor. The classrooms here weren’t grouped by age. Aria had explained that she’d missed years of formal education living in the Capital, doing whatever Guardians-in-training do, so she was making it up now. The system was fluid, based on academic level and physical progression. Our class had faces ranging from fresh eighteen-year-olds to hardened twenty-four-year-olds who’d already seen squad duty on the perimeter.
Aria was waiting for us outside the door, leaning against the wall with an easy grace that felt alien after the morning’s brutality. She wore the same uniform, but it looked different on her—less like a costume, more like armor. Her light brown hair was tied back in a complicated braid, her tan skin glowing under the corridor’s rune-lights. She offered a small, knowing smile that didn’t reach her violet eyes.
“Rough morning?” she asked softly.
I just stared at her. My legs felt like they might dissolve.
She pushed off the wall and opened the classroom door for us. “Come on. This part, at least, shouldn’t involve physical torment.”
We filed in. The classroom was a tiered semicircle of stone benches looking down on a holographic projector. A mix of students were already seated, some looking alert, others still flushed from their own training. The age range was stark—a girl who couldn’t be older than me with nervous eyes, next to a broad-shouldered guy with a scar across his jawline who looked like he chewed nails for breakfast.
The instructor hadn’t arrived yet. We took seats near the back. Tsubaki leaned close, her shoulder touching mine. A point of warmth, of solidarity.
Aria slipped into the seat beside me, her presence a shield. She pulled out a notepad and a stylus, tools that seemed archaic. No tablets here. Just paper, ink, and the weight of everything we didn’t know.
The door at the front of the room swung open. But it wasn’t the history instructor.
It was him. The shadow from the trees.
He walked in with a calm, predatory silence, and the room’s atmosphere shifted, tightened. He wasn’t in a cadet uniform. He wore the sleek, dark combat gear of an active squad, a subtle insignia on his shoulder. His gaze swept the room, impersonal and assessing, and for a heartbeat, it paused on our little group in the back.
On me.
Then he moved to the front, not to teach, but to stand watchfully beside the empty instructor’s podium. His arms folded. His expression was unreadable.
Aria went very still beside me. I heard the faintest intake of breath from Tsubaki.
The game wasn’t just on the field. It was here, too. And the board had just become a lot more complicated.